Guild Wars 2

It is interesting to see what the level 80 players think. Right now I am level 52 and the cost of teleporting is a concern as I have so much things that I need to be concerned about being able to buy. From Skill books to weapons/armor to keeping up my crafting skill with my level, to wanting to explore new zones.

From the way it sounds, once you are level 80 for a bit the cost becomes negligible.
I do have some questions for once you reach max level that would help me better understand the game play at that point. Is a lot of the world explored at that point either from previous questing or events? Do you still buy new gear from vendors just to keep up with the new zones? How close are you to maxing out at least your first crafting skill? Are there fewer quests that make you teleport to other zones?

Perhaps the issue is more that the cost is too high for lower levels players as they have more things they need/can do with their money. I can definitely understand it being a gold sink at max level, that makes perfect sense. But is it necessary to have teleporting be as much of a gold sink for players before they reach max level?

Goatjugsoup, while I do like the general idea of being under a waypoint changing the cost of travel. There would still need to be something to prevent people from teleporting around too much or it would be abused. Some people/bots would just teleport to safe areas to gather then going back to the waypoint and go to the next one. This would allow people/bots to gather so quick it would destroy the current economy.

By the way I appreciate all of the helpful insight everyone is providing, thank you.

xCrusanentx I agree that waypoints as they are, are not a game breaker. For a lot of people though the cost has left them with a bad taste in their mouth. It is a cost that is on the verge of being a prominent budgeting concern, and is the essential way of traveling. Meaning it adds costs to playing with others that are in different zones and even more so to playing with of different levels, as lower level players tend to teleport a lot more (to complete quests). In general it is not a good design to punish people for wanting to play together.

As for you comment about the debuff not being able to gather things, my thought process for that was for cases of extreme amounts of teleporting, for instance 10-20 times in 5 minutes or something on those lines. It would not be something that a normal person playing the game for fun would run in to. More of a hard wall that would absolutely stop farmers at that point.

I like many others have found the waypoints to be overly expensive esspecially when i want to play with a friend and we have to warp a couple of times before we get to the area we want to be in. Now i know the point is to make farming for wood/food/minerals less profitable from just teleporting from area to area, but there has to be a compromise to make it better to play with others.

My idea is to make waypoints initially free to teleport to, however each teleport you get a point of debuff that will last for a length of time. for each point or two of the debuff the price of the waypoints would increase. After a certain number of debuffs other negative affects like unable to gather wood/food/minerals.

obviously the amount of time the amount of time debuffs and the increase amount for the price of waypoints whether it is exponential or linear all needs to be calculated out based on the time it would take to farm from just running around.

I think this would alow players to warp around when they need to with paying much less while preventing people from abusing the waypoints to farm